


Black and White and Red All Over

by devera



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devera/pseuds/devera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it comes to puzzles, Edward just can't help himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black and White and Red All Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coricomile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/gifts).



Ordinarily, it wouldn't have come to Edward's attention. Major homicides kept him quite busy, and when he wasn't working, well there were always things to do, interesting things. He read in the city library. Only up to 516 so far, but in his defence he'd only started two years, four months and eleven days ago and it was easy to get distracted in such a fascinating place.

On Tuesdays he walked Mrs Hollingworth's dachshunds. Remarkable dogs. Quite intelligent. She thought they were sweet but Edward let them down drains and into piles of garbage in the alleys, and they always came trotting back, wagging their little tails, with a big fat rat pinched tight in their bloody jaws. Remarkable. Bred to kill ferrets and badgers, in fact, but Gotham didn't have any of those. Rats served just as well and they were doing the city a service, Edward thought. He liked doing the city a service. It gave so much to him, and it always made him happy that he could give something back. Mrs Hollingworth insisted on giving him forty dollars for the afternoon. He didn’t need the money but she said she preferred him walking them to some stranger because they always came back relaxed and happy.

He shopped on Wednesday, always the same market, always the same items, exactly the same quantities. He liked watching the price fluctuate, although he hadn’t yet worked out precisely how it was influenced by stock market prices.

Sometimes he stayed back at the office, if there wasn't a case on. There were personal projects to finish, cold files to look into, firewalls and security measures to get around. Frustrating. He often requested access to the closed files, but after the first few times when the Captain wanted to know, in that forcibly tolerant tone she had, whether he didn’t have enough to do, he stopped asking. Even he knew the correct answer to that question wasn’t _no._

Movies didn’t interest him terribly much. Too predictable. But he always went to the circus when it was in town, drawn always, always to the side-shows, the prestidigitators and the freaks, excited each time, hoping to see something he couldn't explain, that he couldn't work out, but each time he left feeling vaguely disappointed. It made him a little cranky, so usually the day after, if he wasn't called out to a crime scene, he'd lock himself in his lab and work on cold cases. It seemed to make him feel a little better. What a wonderful, inventive thing, murder was. The ways in which people killed each other. The end result the same, the means, the mechanics, the motive, always different. Most of them weren't that difficult to work out, but some, oh, some were almost impenetrable. That always made feel better, when he had those kinds of cases.

Sadly however, such cases were few and far between. No, the majority of killers in Gotham were motivated by much more mundane factors. They were merely men trying to get away with murder, for money, for love, for power, for revenge. Edward usually had them figured out in under ten minutes; an hour or two if the crime scene was particularly problematic. The trick was in the details - the type of murder weapon, the manner of death, the time, the technique, the location... It all formed a puzzle, and Edward was good at puzzles. That was why he got all the best cases.

Which is why _this_ was so unusual, because it wasn’t a best case; it wasn’t even a vaguely interesting one, but Holdings had contracted gastroenteritis, Finke was on leave, and the only other forensic lead was already on a case. When the marine authority had fished the body out of the garbage catchment in the East River, Edward was the only one available to go so it was only by chance that it came to his attention – a corpse with a stab wound. Ordinarily this was nothing to take note of, but within two minutes of being on the scene, of looking at the body, Edward began to feel like something interesting was happening. It was all in the details.

The victim had worked on a fishing vessel, by the look of the clothes. Time of death difficult to determine but had spent long enough in the water that the soft tissues had bloated and been partially eaten away by aquatic creatures and possibly a few birds. Post-mortem bruising from getting caught in the garbage catchment, so killed at low tide when the river was draining back out to the sea. High tide would have brought the body closer in to the city centre. The China docks were upriver, so it was likely the victim was working there. A busy place, so even more likely, the killer had taken the victim by surprise, stabbed him once and then tipped the body into the water, all without being seen.

Victim also wearing a cheap watch. It had stopped, probably as soon as the body hit the water. The wound had been made by a blade about five or six inches long. There was nothing unusual about it, except for the angle. Peculiar. Specific. The killer was not tall, perhaps five five. Stronger on his or her left side. The blade turned in that direction.

And it was interesting, fascinating, because Edward was _sure_ he'd seen this before. Three times, in fact. An unsolved homicide not far from a street food stand on the outskirts of town, a busboy who worked in Gainsley, and more recently in a charred, bullet-ridden corpse found in a warehouse belonging to one of the Falcone capos, whom they'd also found dead. The corpse had been ID'ed as Maroni's second in command, Frank Carbone, and Edward remembered the case due to the discrepancies. Seven bodies with multiple gunshot wounds, but only Carbone's had been post-mortem. Carbone had in fact been stabbed first, probably with a switch blade; exactly the same method of dispatch, precisely the same angle of attack – up and in and a little to the left – as the unsolved out in Sheil and the Gainsley vic. Exactly the same as this one.

Somebody was killing people, random people, and getting away with it.

Edward didn’t care so much about that, but the why of it, the _why_. Completely unrelated cases. A mechanic, a dishwasher, a mobster, and a trawler. What did these things have in common? Now, _there_ was a puzzle.

Puzzles, Edward strongly believed, were meant to be solved.

+++++++

Edward decided to start with subtlety.

“Who the _fuck_ ,” he heard Detective Bullock bellow across the bullpen as he was coming up from the morgue, “left these dumb-ass case files on my desk?! Was it you, Carridine? Because I swear to God, if it was I will shove these Coroner's reports so far up your…“

Edward didn't wait to hear the rest of it. Detective Bullock seemed to be yelling a lot more since Detective Gordon had left to work at Arkham.

+++++++

Subtlety was ineffective, obviously. Edward decided to go to someone with a much better track record of being supportive. Getting into Arkham was surprisingly easy; Detective Gordon met him at the gate.

"Ed," Gordon said, his expression faintly pained as the hydraulics on the gate gently slid it shut again with a soft _clang_ and Edward was inside. He'd never been inside an insane asylum before. He wondered what it was like. Fascinating.

"What are you doing here?"

Detective Gordon looked, Edward thought, if not good then at least a little less raw around the edges. The uniform was new. Interesting. It somehow suited him, although Edward understood that Detective Gordon had been a solider before he was a policeman, so perhaps uniforms had always suited him. When was a uniform not a uniform, after all?

"I need some help with a case, Detective Gordon," Edward said, and Gordon looked even more pained and turned and started walking away from the gate towards not the main building, but a guard house on the east side of the concourse. He looked up at the guard tower and waved once to someone Edward couldn't see, and then swiped a key card across a pad on the guardhouse door, pushed the door open and led Edward inside.

The inside of the guardhouse was an office of some kind, administrative possibly. To their left there was a room secured behind what Edward assumed was bullet proof glass reinforced with wire, populated with a bank of monitors, communications and a large grated and locked gun and ammunitions rack, but no one was manning the desk and the monitors were not on.

"They haven't hooked everything up yet," Gordon was saying, as he wove through the collection of cheap plastic chairs and old Formica-topped tables that took up the rest of the space towards a small kitchenette which looked to be stocked with about the same quality products as the break room at the precinct had. "Coffee?"

Edward smiled. "No, thank you," he said. "About my case, Detective?"

Gordon was silent while he tipped a packet of instant coffee and two sugars into a cup and filled it with hot water from the urn, and then he turned. His attention was on stirring his coffee but his face was grave, a little… sad, Edward thought.

"Ed, you… can't call me that any more, okay?" He moved to sit down at the closest table. Edward, recognising that being on a level with someone when you wanted something from them was generally thought to be preferable, sat down too. "And you can't bring me police files. I'm not on the force now, remember?"

For a moment Edward didn't understand why Detective Gordon thought he _didn't_ remember; he was here, after all.

"They're not police files, they're forensics reports," Edward corrected. "And, well, I did just tell a _little_ lie - it _isn't_ a case as such. But I think it should be."

Gordon looked at him at that. He still hadn't drunk any of his coffee, but his eyes when they met Edwards had something different in them. Shrewdness, Edward might have said. Suddenly there was something about Gordon, a tentative, inquisitive tension that put Edward in mind of a hunting dog picking up a scent.

"You're the only person who ever really listens to me," Edward continued, pressing his advantage, however small. "Listened," he amended. "I thought you could give me your opinion. Strictly off the record, of course."

Gordon studied him for a moment, but Edward already sensed victory. Gordon put his cup down on the table in front of him.

"What have you got?"

Edward pulled out his files and began to explain.

+++++

They didn't have long. Detective Gordon was still supposed to be working, after all, and he had always been very observant of the time.

"Sorry, Ed," he said finally, and pushed the reports back across the table towards Edward. "My break's over. I've got to get back to work."

"All right," Edward agreed. "But I have something, don't I."

Gordon stood and took his now empty coffee cup over to the sink and rinsed it out and then upended it and put it in a rack to dry.

"Seems like you do," he agreed, wiping his hands and turning back. "But Ed, this isn't your job. You realise that, right? Put your suspicions to Captain Essen. She'll assign someone to it."

Edward gathered up the files and slid them back into his satchel, considering his next words. On one hand, Detective Gordon was a stickler for the rules; on the other hand, however, when push came to shove, he sometimes made his own.

"All right," Edward told him finally. He liked Detective Gordon, so he would at least do that much. He didn't bother to mention that he frequently went to Captain Essen and she just as frequently told him to stop trying to interfere with closed lines of inquiry and get back to the work he was paid for. Frustrating but, he supposed, technically correct.

"Is there some reason you didn't take this to Harvey?" Gordon asked, and then winced. "Never mind. How is he, anyway?"

Edward rose, clutching his satchel. "Oh, you know Detective Bullock," he told him vaguely, and Gordon smiled a little.

"Yeah, okay," he sighed. "Tell him I said to stop yelling at people, lay off the fatty foods, and to call me."

"I will, yes, thank you," Edward said, but he had a better sense of self-preservation than to mention the first two to Detective Bullock.

Detective Gordon saw him out of the guardhouse and he was just turning to say thank you again – he really did like Detective Gordon – when Gordon's gaze riveted past him and away towards the gate and his expression changed completely. Edward closed his mouth again and turned as well, to see what was making Gordon look like that. A lone figure stood at the gate, black suit, black hair, slight build, perhaps somewhere around five and a half feet. Gordon stared at the man a moment, and then his mouth turned grim and hard.

"I'll show you out, Ed," he said, but his tone was not as friendly as it had been before and wasn't, Edward was fairly sure, directed at him.

They walked to the gate in a silence, but by the time they'd reached it, it still hadn't opened. The man on the other side was quite young, Edward realised, with pale, sharp features and a thin, expectant smile.

"Why, hello, Detective Gordon," the young man said, as if surprised. "Fancy meeting you here."

"Cobblepot," Detective Gordon greeted grudgingly. "What do you want?"

Edward recognised the name. This was the man Detective Gordon had been arrested for shooting, and then been released twenty minutes later when said victim had walked in the front door of the precinct.

"I'm afraid," Cobblepot sighed dramatically, "I've been reduced to errand boy. I'm here to deliver some papers to the contractors from Mister Maroni."

And Maroni was the man Edward's vics two and three had worked for, before they'd been stabbed.

Detective Gordon didn't seem terribly pleased at this news, but he turned and waved to the guard tower again. The hydraulics came on and the gate started to grind open.

"I suppose you'd better come in then," Detective Gordon said.

Cobblepot smiled and waited for the gate to open enough so he didn't have to move around it, and then stepped across the threshold, walking favouring his right.

"Thank you," Cobblepot said, as if the President himself were letting him in. "It is so very nice to see you again, Detective Gordon."

Gordon looked pained again. "I'm not a detective," he pointed out.

"Not right now," Cobblepot said airily, somehow implying in those three words that the state was merely a temporary one. "The contractors are in the main building?"

"Yeah," Detective Gordon sighed. "I'll walk you in." He turned to Edward. "Thanks for visiting, Ed."

Edward shook himself, dragged his attention away from Gordon's other visitor, who was now staring at him with a suddenly keen interest.

"It was nice to see you again," Edward said in return, because that was what people said. Gordon gave him another quick smile and clapped him lightly on the shoulder and Edward took this to mean it was time for him to go, so he turned and stepped over the gate track and then started to walk away, but as soon as he heard the gate clang shut again, he stopped and turned back.

Detective Gordon and his visitor were walking across the concourse towards the main building, and yes, Cobblepot was definitely walking with a limp. It looked in fact like his right leg was just a little shorter than his left, and poorly angled. A birth deformity, or a badly healed break, perhaps. Either way it would mean that he would lead with his right side primarily, the weak side, using his eight and relying on his stronger side, the left, for stability. He also worked for Don Maroni, and he was precisely the right height to stab a man up and underneath the costal arch at the junction of the eleventh rib.

Very interesting.

+++++

The first thing to do was, Edward knew, find out whatever he could about the suspect. There was a file, of course. It was in lock up at the MCU, but a few interdepartmental transfer requests resulted in copies on Edward's desk close to a week later. It was amazing how easily paperwork got confused sometimes. Edward made a note to let the department know its internal requisition processes needed a little work, and sat down to open the first file.

What he found was… encouraging. A CI for the MCU against Mooney, and then allegedly executed on the same's orders. MCU believed the hit to have been carried out by Detective Gordon until Cobblepot had appeared in the precinct alive and well a little over four weeks later. There was no record of where he had been in the interim, but Edward went back to the case file for the unsolved murder in Sheal and the description of the man who had bought a hot dog and a can of soft drink at the food cart ten minutes before the body had been found fit.

Out of town was a likely scenario then, if Cobblepot had been marked for execution and Detective Gordon in his compassion had let him go. And if one made the connection between the Sheal murder, the busboy whom Edward was certain would be found to have worked at Maroni's restaurant in South Gainsley, and the body of Maroni's second in command at the Falcone-owned warehouse some six weeks later, the pieces seemed to start clicking into place. Cobblepot had fled the city, believed dead, and upon his return had clearly not felt welcome in Falcone's camp, so he had turned to Maroni's, filling the vacancy left by the dishwasher. Conveniently, in a robbery at Maroni's some three weeks later, the position of floor manager became vacant, which Cobblepot filled almost immediately. Then, almost two weeks after that, a hit on one of Falcone's warehouses, perhaps in retaliation, where Carbone, Maroni's right had man, had also been killed, in a manner not entirely consistent with the other deaths.

The puzzle was starting to unravel. It seemed obvious. Cobblepot had to have been the informant there also. He would have known where that warehouse was, and what went on in it and when, and he had motive to hurt the Falcone capos. But with the spot by Maroni's right hand suddenly vacant, Cobblepot would have also been arguably well positioned to step into that space too. What had he said at Arkham? _I've been reduced to errand boy._ As if the task was beneath him. As if he was someone important.

Somebody, Edward thought with a little grin, seemed to be moving up in the world.

But of course, he couldn't prove anything. All the evidence was circumstantial at best. He needed something far more solid. What, Edward asked himself as he closed the files and put them back into the return requisition satchels, would Detective Gordon do in this situation?

Why, he'd go and investigate, wouldn't he.

+++++

It was all going well, terrifically well. Edward had "staked out" the target's place of employment, sitting in his car – well, it was Mrs Hollingworth's car but she thought he was visiting a sick relative for the night – across and down the street a little. He had drinks and chips and a Thermos of tea, since he didn't particularly like coffee, because that's what you had on a stake out, and he sat and watched the restaurant, customers coming and going for an hour, then two, and then almost three. He wasn't bored. It was in fact all very thrilling. Just like Detectives Gordon and Bullock would do it, although Edward wasn't entirely sure he would want to be stuck in a car for three hours with Detective Bullock, whose idea of personal hygiene left a little to be desired.

At some time around eleven pm, Cobblepot emerged. He turned and started walking down the street and Edward realised with a start that he was going to get away, so he scrambled out of the car, fumbling his camera into his bag and began following Cobblepot down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

Cobblepot shuffled east along Duncan, hunched in his coat as if hiding. Interesting. Edward kept his eyes on him. The closer to 25th they got, the more traffic there was, until Edward was having a much harder time keeping Cobblepot in sight, afraid he would lose him, and then he did, at the lights under the Central El line. One moment he was there, standing amongst the crowd on the corner waiting for the lights to change. A train rattled by overhead, its lights flickering down onto the street, and then when Edward looked again, somehow Cobblepot was gone.

He crossed the road to the spot where his suspect had been standing and looked around, trying to determine which way he might have gone. He picked north, along 22nd towards Kinsey, as there were less people in that direction and Cobblepot's furtive manner had seemed to suggest he wanted to avoid crowds. Edward started walking in that direction, kept going far enough that the Duncan pedestrian traffic was a distant palette of movement and shadows under the overpass lights behind him. He stopped walking. This was futile. He'd lost his suspect. He would have to return to stake out another night and -

"Hello again," a voice said from the shadows of a shop front beside him, and Edward jumped and spun and the very man he had been looking for stepped out into the light, smiling a sharp smile, his eyes keen and bright and sly on Edward's face. "Fancy meeting you here."

He'd said that to Detective Gordon yesterday also. It was safe to say he recognised Edward from that encounter.

"Yes, um, hello," Edward said, and then didn't say anything else, which seemed only to make Cobblepot smile even more.

"You're following me," he said finally, not so much an accusation as an observation. Edward smiled back.

"Yes," he said.

Cobblepot's smile thinned. "May I ask why? You're not a police officer. I'd know if you were."

Edward pursed his lips a little and squared his shoulders, clutching his satchel to him with slightly more force than strictly necessary.

"Well, no, I'm not. Actually, I'm a forensic scientist."

"You are," Cobblepot said, sounding like the discovery pleased him no end. "How interesting. So, why, Mister Forensic Scientist, are you following me?"

"Well," Edward began. "I think you might be killing people. Stabbing them, to be precise."

Cobblepot stared at him for a second, his face quite abruptly and entirely blank. And then he started to laugh.

Edward frowned a little bit. He wasn't sure it was supposed to be _funny_.

"You," Cobblepot said, clearly trying to not to laugh and failing quite thoroughly. "You're not supposed to _tell_ me that, if I'm your suspect. You're definitely not a police officer, are you."

" _No_ ," Edward said, hating to repeat himself. "I told you, I'm a-"

"Yes, I know. A forensic scientist. Who suspects me of stabbing people. Do you have any evidence, may I ask?"

"No," Edward admitted. "But there's always evidence to be found somewhere; you just have to know where to look for it."

"Okay," Cobblepot agreed, in an amused tone. "All right. So, I'm your, what? Personal vendetta? Did I _allegedly_ stab someone important to you?"

"Oh, no," Edward sniffed. "Nothing like that. It's just. You're a… well, a _puzzle_ , and I like that sort of thing – puzzles, mysteries, riddles. I'm good at them. I like solving them."

Cobblepot smiled a strange smile and moved forward. He almost seemed to glide, his black suit and his black hair in the shadows, his pale face the only truly discernible thing about him.

"Really? Are you saying you like me, then?"

Edward blinked. He hadn't precisely thought of it like that, but he'd found Detective Gordon quite difficult to understand, and he liked him, so he supposed the same could be said in this situation.

"I suppose I do, yes."

"Do you?" he mused. "How interesting. You're a very interesting man, Mister Forensic Scientist. That's two interesting men I've met in as many months."

"Well," Edward said, at a bit of a loss. No one had called him interesting before. "Um, so, did you?"

Cobblepot tilted his head a little to the side. His gaze was very… unwavering. He was looking at Edward like Edward was the puzzle, not the other way around.

"Did I what? Stab people?"

"Yes," Edward said.

"Well, you're good at solving things, or so you claim; you tell me."

Edward frowned again. "I think you did. But I can't be certain."

"Perhaps you just haven't looked in the right places?" Cobblepot suggested with a smirk. "Or asked the right questions. I have a question for you, if I may?"

Edward nodded carefully.

Cobblepot licked his lips. "What goes into the water black and comes out red?"

Edward didn't even have to think about that. "That easy," he said. "A lobster."

Cobblepot smiled again, this time sharper, like a shark. That's what he suddenly reminded Edward of, a shark, with a large mouth and hungry teeth, like the ones he had seen in cartoons as a child.

"No," Cobblepot said. "A _penguin_."

That didn't make any- That wasn't the answer to the-

"That isn't the answer," Edward objected. "To that riddle. Penguins are only partially black, and they don't come out red when cooked. Or, at least I would assume they don't since I've never actually cooked one."

"Oh, this one does," Cobblepot said. "You'll see. Red all over."

 He took one more step closer to Edward, and something in his tone… something… made Edward take a nervous, involuntary step back. Cobblepot only smirked, and stepped around him, and began walking away, back towards the crowds trailing along Duncan Street.

"I hope you catch your murderer, Mr Forensic Scientist," he said over his shoulder, his voice floating down the street back to Edward. "It was nice to have met you. See you again sometime."

+++

Edward decided after that that his idea of staking out the suspect perhaps hadn't been one of his better plans. Stick to what you're good at, that's what he thought. And he couldn't help but wonder about what Cobblepot had said about asking the right questions. That was always the key to a good riddle; not what was being said, but what questions you needed to ask to solve it. Perhaps he had found the puzzle that was Oswald Cobblepot, but until he worked out what the right questions were, he wasn't going to solve anything.

And then, three weeks from the day he'd followed Cobblepot through the lower east side of Gainsly, he was called out to another crime scene. The vic was an ice van driver. He'd been found in the back of his truck, frozen solid after having been parked for approximately three days underneath the west side of South Hinkley Bridge, close to the water. He was dressed, strangely enough, in a cheap black tuxedo, and he hadn't been stabbed; his throat had been cut. The blood had run down his chest and turned his white shirt red.

What were the right questions, Edward thought as he crouched down in front of the body, but as he began his examination, he suspected the only one that really mattered had already been asked:

_What went into the water black, and came out red?_

What indeed? He had a feeling the answer would reveal itself at some point very soon. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like your gift, recipient! I enjoyed trying to get into Edward's head a little, although it was a bit of a challenge since he has so far not really featured much in the show. I think he's got the potential to be quite the crazy and fun character, very much like the comic/cartoon Enigma, and I do hope that one day he and Oswald meet, although it probably won't go quite like this.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
